Drumbeat: November 8, 2009

"Every serious discussion of the environment ... is ultimately about oil, whether it specifically mentions oil or not," Owen writes. The explosive growth and general prosperity of the past century have been made possible by the "prodigious abundance" of oil; the problems of the coming century will involve "oil's increasing scarcity and cost."

Owen is not a crank or true believer about peak oil; he reports that the decline of oil production has been predicted for nearly a century. He looks at what we know for sure: However much oil is left, it's being used up at a rate of about 350 billion gallons a day; it's getting more expensive to produce; and demand is growing as China and India push ahead to repeat America's mistakes.

About two-thirds of all the oil produced in the U.S. and Canada goes to transportation, mainly cars, "a use for which there is currently no attractive fuel substitute."

And it's not just the Hummer in the driveway, Owen observes, it's everything the Hummer makes possible — sprawl and its duplication of the built environment, oversized houses and irrigated lawns, added roads, costly extension of the power grid, 100-mile commutes, etc.

This whole way of life is dependent on cheap oil. Sooner or later, cheap oil will be over. Then what?

(Bloomberg) -- Saudi warplanes bombed Yemeni rebels, as a five-day offensive by the oil-rich kingdom on its border with Yemen left three soldiers dead and another four missing.

Saudi Arabia’s air force fired missiles “intensively” at Yemeni border villages today, the Shiite Muslim Houthi rebels said in an e-mailed statement. Saudi officials say they are ejecting the rebels from their country’s mountainous borders with Yemen and have not entered Yemeni territory.

Ghawar field, the world's largest, is a long asymmetric structure that is 230 kilometers long and approximately 30 miles wide however the width diminishes going south. The announcement makes no mention of Ain Dar, the most mature part of Ghawar in the extreme northwestern region of the field. Ain Dar has been under pressure maintenance by peripheral water injection for over 40 years. Ain Dar (and other parts of the field) began producing salt water in the late 1970s and by 2005, the cut was 42%. All of Ain Dar was wet since 1984. Once water became a major problem, many existing vertical wells were converted to short lateral horizontals running along the top 10 feet of the Arab D zone, the main pay. New wells were drilled horizontally to the same layer. Today, the redevelopment process has gone on so long that future oil production from Ain Dar is speculative. Shedgum, adjacent to Ain Dar on the east, is not much better off.

Mexico's state oil monopoly, Pemex, which has extensive operations in the Gulf of Mexico, activated its hurricane contingency program but oil and gas production was unaffected, a company spokesman said.

U.S. energy companies said on Friday they were monitoring the storm's progress but had not yet begun evacuating any production platforms.

An official with Brazil's electricity regulator has confirmed that large scale blackouts in 2005 and 2007 were caused by people hacking into the computers that control the electricity grid.

The official with ANEEL, which regulates electricity producers and transmission in Brazil, said that while the evidence was not absolute, it was widely believed that hackers broke into control computers and shut down power to millions.

The city of Goma and the surrounding area of eastern Congo hold many dangers, including armed rebellions, famine and volcanic explosions.

But there is another, more mysterious threat as well: large reservoirs of methane and carbon dioxide lying deep beneath Lake Kivu’s surface and along its shores. While the gases can be tapped for energy, they can also kill. Mr. Masha is believed to have died instantly when he hid in an invisible bubble of carbon dioxide, known as a mazuku, or “evil wind” in Swahili.

KINGSTON, Tenn. (AP) — Smokestack scrubbers will eliminate most of the sulfur emissions from the coal-fired Kingston Fossil Plant, but they will also produce a new waste stream for a site still engaged in a $1 billion cleanup from a huge ash spill.

“It is a tradeoff,” Ron Nash of the Tennessee Valley Authority said during a recent tour of Kingston’s new $500 million scrubber complex. “In order to clean the air up, you create a landfill.”

Few trees are as well suited to the hyperarid ecosystem of the Atacama-Sechura Desert, nestled between the Andes and the Pacific. The huarango captures moisture coming from the west as sea mist. Its roots are among the longest of any tree, extending more than 150 feet to tap subterranean water channels.

The resilience of the huarango and its role in taming one of the world’s driest climates have long beguiled this country’s poets. Schoolchildren here, for instance, recite the words of José María Arguedas, a leading 20th-century writer: “The huarangos let in the sun, while keeping out the fire.”

But poetry is one thing. The necessities of human civilizations, and their capacity to wreak havoc on the ecosystems on which they depend, are another.

Back in February, President Obama made a public statement against continued development of the Canadian tar sands (also known as oil sands) which are expensive and difficult to refine and carry a significantly larger carbon footprint than other oils. In that visit Obama came out in support of green jobs and renewable energy as the solution to the energy crisis and the need for more independence from foreign oil.

Fast forward to the end of the year and it appears that Obama has begun to flip flop on the need to slow global warming pollution and push for renewable energy standards to meet growing energy demands. He recently approved a deal to allow a new pipeline to deliver synthetic crude produced from Canadian tar sands to U.S. refineries. The administration is apparently stuck between wanting to reduce the country's reliance on OPEC and cutting carbon emissions which are having negative effects on the environment. In defense of his change in directions, Obama has said he wants to pursue carbon capture programs with the Canadians-a solution that is likely to have only a small impact on emissions, and not any time in the near future.

If you think the partisan divide over healthcare reform is ugly, take a look at the animus in the Senate as debate continues on a key climate change bill. So wide is the gulf that long-held Senate traditions on decorum are breaking down. And as Washington fiddles, the Earth burns.

If you want to give a U.N. climate change negotiator indigestion, which isn't terribly hard to do these days, mention three letters: W-T-O. That stands for the World Trade Organization, the global body charged with supervising and liberalizing international commerce — and a whopper of a cautionary tale. Back in November 2001, in Doha, Qatar, the WTO launched what is known as the Doha Development Round of negotiations, an effort to increase global trade by reducing trade barriers. Eight years later, the "round" is still ongoing, the talks riven by deep disagreements — especially over agriculture subsidies in the West — between developed and developing countries. There's no end in sight.

While Congress and the Obama administration consider climate change legislation, a group of researchers labor quietly at field test plots and on computers across the country in work that may offer answers for those decision makers in Washington and assist producers in making smart decisions to mitigate climate change on their own operations.

WASHINGTON -- As an evangelical Christian living in Texas, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe found that many conservatives had questions about climate change based on things they'd heard on talk radio.

So Hayhoe and her husband, Andrew Farley, the pastor of a nondenominational church in Lubbock, Texas, decided to answer the questions in a new book from religious publisher FaithWords, "A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-based Decisions."

Link up top: Halliburton to coax more oil out of largely depleted Ghawar field

Finally the truth is starting to leak out. Ghawar is largely depleted. It is now in the milk down stage. In 2005 the water cut was 42%. That puts the lie to this statement by the Managing Director of Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Energy Initiative Keep in mind this statement was made in November of 2006, well after the water cut had risen to 42%.

The water cut in Ghawar, the world's largest field, which has a sustained production capacity of 5 mb/d has declined from a peak of 35% to just 32% because of advances in technology and continual improvements in field management. If past years are any indication, this trend will continue.

It looks like we may be finally getting the truth about Saudi oil production and reserves. Not that we can expect the whole truth to come out any time soon but as stories like this begin to trickle out, it will finally dawn on people that there is a real problem with future Saudi oil production and those massive reserves they claim.

Of course, the key point is that we are talking about North Ghawar, but as you know, the reservoir quality drops off tremendously toward the south end of the structure. In any case, Heinberg's August, 2006 comment about Ghawar:

...At the ASPO conference a well-connected industry insider who wishes not to be directly quoted told me that his own sources inside Saudi Arabia insist that production from Ghawar is now down to less than 3 million barrels per day, and that the Saudis are maintaining total production at only slowly dwindling levels by producing other fields at maximum rates. This, if true, would be a bombshell: most estimates give production from Ghawar at 5.5 Mb/d.

In any case, I thought, circa 2006, that the (North) Ghawar and Cantarell declines were two warning beacons, burning brightly in the night sky, heralding the onset of Peak Oil.

Well I think this contract includes all of Ghawar except Ain Dar, the very north most portion of Ghawar. I expect Ain Dar is too far gone to fool with.

The The announcement makes no mention of Ain Dar, the most mature part of Ghawar in the extreme northwestern region of the field. Ain Dar has been under pressure maintenance by peripheral water injection for over 40 years.

We know the Saudis are looking at injecting CO2 into Ghawar though as the article states they really do not need to. Yeah right!

Add it all up, Saudi must be seeing dramatic decline rates in all their super giants or else they would not be spending billions trying to enhance recovery and trying to find oil in places that would be extremely expensive to bring on line and produce. Oil from the sub-salt areas of the Red Sea would be about the most expensive oil in the world.

Incidentally, to avoid confusion, we should remind people that the Halliburton article was written by the other Michael Lynch, the one who does not live in a fantasy world populated by unicorns, elves, fairies and oil fields that never deplete.

This is a first for Aramco, an "integrated turnkey drilling project." How does this differ from previous arrangements they've brokered with service companies?

E Lynch's pieces are always full of intriguing bits of info - how does he know that production in Haradh III is falling? This is pretty startling in places, the annoucement that future production in north Ghawar is "speculative" for instance. Peter Wells has came to the same conclusion after perusing IHS data, albeit he believes other fields will maintain Saudi output.

Perhaps it would be instructive to compare south Ghawar or Khurais to other giant fields with problematic production - if such exist. I'd suggest Cantarell or Prudhoe but those by no means required exotic tech to break 200 kb/d. Yet they are claiming Khurais will somehow break past all these hurdles - and the IEA is basing models on these claims.

KLR -- I don't know the specifics on that deal...probably will never be released publicly. But "turn key" deals (where the cost is fixed regardless of what it actually takes to get the job done) are usually done in slack periods like we see now. When times are good contractors charge a day rate. Problems happen and the projects runs an extra 100 days = the operators pays the extra cost. But when competition is tough the contractor will take on that financial risk. But turn key deals usually have specific "outs" for the contractor that can limit their financial exposure.

This contract is Saudi Aramco's first-ever award for an integrated turnkey drilling contract and is an important part of Saudi Aramco's plan to explore new avenues of collaboration with major oil field services providers.

"He recently approved a deal to allow a new pipeline to deliver synthetic crude produced from Canadian tar sands to U.S. refineries. The administration is apparently stuck between wanting to reduce the country's reliance on OPEC and cutting carbon emissions which are having negative effects on the environment. In defense of his change in directions, Obama has said he wants to pursue carbon capture programs with the Canadians-a solution that is likely to have only a small impact on emissions, and not any time in the near future."

This is why I'm not too worried about the Greenpeacers. The American public, given a choice between being green and having a job, will say to hell with carbon dioxide.

You mean "the American public, given a choice between "depriving" their kids now, or sentencing them to a horrible future of disease and starvation, remember that they really don't have a concept of the future being worse than the present, and so dismiss the problem out of hand."

The American public, given a choice between being green and having a job, will say to hell with carbon dioxide.

Given a choice between being green and having a job, the American public will find that walking 50 miles a day to work makes them unhappy. The American politicians are aware that unhappy voters translate into not being reelected.

Sources of crude oil and products for the U.S. (August, 2009, thousands of barrels per day):

Oil and products imports from Canada are nearly half as large as US domestic production, and slowly but surely increasing. Mexican and Venezuelan imports are declining (Mexico rapidly), Saudi Arabia claims they can produce more oil but we're not too sure we believe them. The EIA claims that US production will increase, but we're not sure we believe them, either.

In 20 years, most likely the US will be importing more oil from Canada than it is producing itself, and the exports will be nearly all from non-conventional oil sources. Canada's conventional oil fields will be nearly exhausted by that time.

Venezuelan production has been falling ever since Chavez took power, and Mexican production has fallen off a cliff recently due to the problems at Cantarell. There were some problems with Canadian oil sands production last year, so production was down a bit, but is back up again this year.

However, let's look at Canadian exports of oil and products to the US for the month of August, decade over decade for the last 30 years:

The EIA shows Canadian crude + condensate production through July to be flat to the 2008 average rate, and exports do look more impressive when one ignores those pesky oil importers on the eastern side of Canada. It's only in the past two years that Canada cracked the 1.0 mbpd net export mark:

At the event organized by Prince Philip's Alliance of Religions and Conservation, leaders from nine of the world's major faith traditions are highlighting the Earth's fragility, and discussing initiatives to protect the planet against the ravages of climate change.

Prince Philip said, "The fact that the majority of the world's faiths ascribe the creation of the world to an all-powerful deity, implies that the leaders and followers of each faith have a moral responsibility for the continued well-being of our planet, and particularly for its natural environment. In recent times it has become apparent that the sheer size of the human population, and its consequent increasing demand for natural resources, is seriously threatening the future health of our planet and the welfare of all life on Earth."

"When it comes to conservative Christians, I think the real question is who can we trust on this issue?" Farley said. "The scientist who has opposed us in the past, perhaps on issues such as evolution versus creation? Can we trust the local radio talk-show host on conservative radio who seems to be vehemently opposed to the idea that climate change is happening and speaks out quite passionately? Should I trust my local pastor who has a B-minus in high school biology?"

Silver Donald Cameron frequently writes about energy issues and his articles are always on the money.

Cheap food depends on cheap oil

Our farmers are also hammered by free trade and international industrial agriculture. Vast irrigated acreages soaked in fertilizer and pesticides, harvested by automated machinery. Cattle feedlots the size of small counties. Greenhouses and chicken prisons as big as farms used to be. Economies of scale. Grow the stuff in California, Chile, China, wherever it’s cheap. Load containers. Dispatch ships. Reap profits.

[...]

The industrial food system is absurdly unsustainable, and its lunacies place all Nova Scotians at risk. Our food, says heritage seed guru Tom Stearns, is "marinated in oil." The fertilizers and pesticides all derive from oil. Irrigation relies on oil. Diesel delivers the products. It’s all balanced on a knife-edge, totally reliant on cheap oil. When the oil price touched $147 a barrel, the whole fantasy apparatus faltered. At $300 a barrel, or $500, it will stop.

NOVA SCOTIA could experience a small economic boom next year now that the province says it will allow timber harvested from Crown land to be burned in biomass power plants, one renewable energy proponent predicts.

Tread carefully on our forests
Many questions need answers before we allow wood-burning power plants

Lately, much media activity and discussion has been generated concerning biomass and NSPI’s plan to generate 60 megawatts of power from "waste" wood at the NewPage Paper mill in Port Hawkesbury.

Earlier this month, the provincial government approved the sale of timber from Crown land for the proposal, but it’s not clear if the plant will go ahead.

According to reports, this plant would require 600,000-700,000 tonnes of biomass annually. Where will this amount of biomass come from? A wise, ancient, Chinese philosopher once remarked, "Once you’ve raised a hungry beast, you must continue to feed it!" How will this ‘beast’ be kept satiated?

Just came across an excerpt from a new book by an Alberta journalist called Green Oil (yup!). It mentions a manure-biogas-electricity/ethanol project in Alberta and profiles the entrepreneurs behind it. Apparently Alberta is a manure superpower and this kind of project represents the future - tar sands and such being the temporary leverage for getting there.

Well it looks like the Oil Industry might not yet have escaped Hurricane Season. Ida just forecast in latest GFDL model run to make landfall as Cat 2 at Mobile Bay moving NNE into Baldwin county. Pressure at landfall 968

That's just one model run though and the official guidance remains for Cat 1 or lower at landfall but Ida is strengthening and expected to reach Cat 2 later today with Cat 3 possible.

It looks like Ida is forecast to come in as a Category 1 storm, so really not all that bad.

It also looks like it will also go east of a fair amount of the oil and gas infrastructure. Even if it does take some out, storage levels are pretty high, especially of natural gas. The gas people would love prices higher.

Plus it was really expected to fall apart before it reached land in the initial models. It was only when the 1200Z(GMT/UTC) GFDL model run came in with a Cat 2 up Mobile Bay that a few folks probably choked on their cornflakes :-). However consensus track has it to the right of this and a bit weaker.

Latest recon data has it on its way to Cat 3 right now and it might just make it there. Still it is November and it will weaken again in cooler waters so certainly nothing to overly worry about yet (Official forecast leaves it as Cat 1 at best an more likely just a tropical storm) but it will be interesting to see what it looks like tomorrow

A Category 1 hurricane is a major storm. One to take seriously. Even a high-end tropical storm is a serious event.

Here are two examples from 2005, among many thoughout the years of hurricane record:

Hurricane Stan landed as a Cat-1 and resulted in approximately 1,600 deaths, with at least 80 direct, and a caused extensive property damage (~$1 billion) in Mexico and surrounds.

Hurricane Katrina crossed the southern tip of Florida with Cat-1 strength (and weakened), brought a 3-5 foot storm surge, knocked out power to at least a million customers, caused $1-2 billion in damage and killed at least 14 people.

East coast south Florida resident here: Why? Because It's just a little cat 1 or a 2 at the most.
Most people will just take the day off from work and hang out at the pool and drink beer and eat hot dogs... that plus the fact that hurricane season is pretty much over. /sarcanol

Hey, Darwinian, I have a brother in law there! I think because of the season, there is almost no chance of this thing hitting as a major cane. And, they probably figure, that compared to Ivan, this one will be a puppy dog. Of course you can always get hit with an enbedded otrnado, but thats not a huge worry. Again, this late in the year sea surface temperatures, just won't support a monster storm.

The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, which takes in an average of 1 million barrels of foreign crude from cargo ships daily, stopped offloading tankers shortly after noon CST Sunday (1800 GMT) due to deteriorating sea conditions, according to a spokeswoman.

David Shields at the ASPO Conference talked about the issue. He said Mexico would cease to be an oil exporter between 2013 and 2017.

Some of his comments were as follows:

• Cantarell will decline further, butmore slowly.
• Ku-Maloob-Zaapwill begin its decline in 2011 or 2012 and could fall sharply.
• Other producing fields, onshore and offshore, are mature and small and will decline sharply.
• Exploration efforts have produced no significant results so far.
• Chicontepec is a false hope to replace Cantarell.
• Deep water efforts are embryonic and are a very long-term prospect.

My own view is that Mexico may never become a new oil importer, unless they have things of value to trade for what little oil is available in the export market after their production drops too low. After exports drop off, they may have to learn to live on what they have.

The rapid decline of crude production in Mexico, particularly in light of the "spectacular" collapse of output at the Cantarell field, will push Mexico into the family of net crude importers sometime between 2013 and 2015, according to a Pemex contractor and journalist.

David Shields, author of the book "Pemex, The Oil Reform," told the Association for the Study of Peak Oil meeting in Denver that in Pemex' "official discourse" and forecasts about Mexican output, "they get it wrong every time."

"Over 30 years, Cantarell has provided $440 billion from export earnings," Shields said. "That's a lot of money, and it's just vanished in a way because Mexico remains poor and we don't see the benefits from it," he said. "It's been used for short-term expenditures and financial crises."

Shields said that the "official discourse" out of Pemex has Chicontepec ultimately replacing Cantarell. But Chicontepec recently has been beset by little progress after Pemex brought in such companies as Weatherford and Schlumberger to work it. According to Shields, Chicontepec is only producing 30,000 b/d even though about 2,000 wells have been drilled. "So this layer of future production may not be there," Shields said.

I suspect that by the end of this year that Mexico will probably have shipped about 90% of their post-2004 cumulative net oil exports, and as noted up the thread, total net oil exports from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela dropped from 5.0 mbpd in 2004 to 4.0 mbpd in 2008, with all three countries showing net export declines in 2008.

The article about creating a landfill for sulfur emissions removed from plant exhaust reminded me of one of my nuclear engineering classes as an undergrad . . . we learned about the LAW of waste. As in,

"You can put it in the land, the air, or the water. Those are your options once you decide it's waste. People can spend years trying to avoid that simple fact."

Here in W. Ky we suffered a tremendous massive ice storm. We lost huge amounts of timber due to this. I remember spending two nights and days listending to what sounded like cannon fire as huge tree limbs and trees hit the ground.

I was without power for 6 weeks. The cost to our woodlands and the costs for cleanup was mind boggling. For months heavy equipment worked the right of ways filled huge trailers with the debris. All of which was hauled to huge dumping sites of which there are many. The piles are so large as to defy stating. Many many millions and millions of cubic yards of limbs and tree trunks. As late as midsummer they were still hauling it away.

We were declared a National Diaster along with adjoining states like Illinois, Arkanasas and Missouri where some areas were hit and hard or harder than my area. It covered about 15 counties in W. Ky as I recall.

Many made a lot of money but most lost very valuable timber.

So what does it look like 10 months after the ordeal?

Like this: I seen they were basically BURNING all those enormous stacks of wood/timber. Yes digging pits alongside then setting them afire. The smoke tells where its happening. All this what could have been used as organic matter is now destroyed or being destroyed.

This is in my mind about the most incomphrensible stupid act I have witnessed in some time.

It would have by itself decomposed into usuable material however it seems our governing bodies are ignorant beyond belief as to handle anything on this scale or even at a minute level.

My faith is politicians has never been good. Now I wonder...just how dumb can government get?

Our future is to some degree placed in their hands. We are finished if this is a clue as to what they are capable of.

Sad for me to watch this. Very sad. Sad to look out of the once magnificant woodlands and see just toothpicks sticking up in the air. With the leaves going or gone the reality is once more visible.

Its sickening to drive where once we had beautiful wood lands and timber and once more see the destruction.

I doubt that much animal life will survive this winter. They live in the woods basically. They forage there. There is almost nothing left for them or us for that matter. Yet landowners are now busy hiring loggers to come in and cut whats left.

When country land owners get in a bind they always take from nature and cut their woods down.

The logging trucks never seem to stop rolling thru my small home town. On the way to sawmills or the paper mills.

We have eaten the seed corn. Bad bad times are coming. The politicos will bury us in short order.

Airdale-the only ones to profit are buzzards and carrion eaters. Here and in elected covens. I am severely disgusted at it all. I almost vomit when I open Drudge Report and see that ugly ignorant Pelosi's face starting at me braying about her control or what she wants. And people portrayed Bush as a monkey? Really!

This is in my mind about the most incomphrensible stupid act I have witnessed in some time.

It would have by itself decomposed into usuable material however it seems our governing bodies are ignorant beyond belief as to handle anything on this scale or even at a minute level.

My faith is politicians has never been good. Now I wonder...just how dumb can government get?

Pure typical BAU thinking. Whatever is most convenient and quick. Maybe if we had a price on carbon, someone would figure out they could make money buying the stuff. But, humans are so frustratingly foolish, that this is what you will see anywhere USA.

And since we have governmnet by the people -(and I suspect government by the less qualified of the people), that is what you get. I bet the fact that this stuff could be a resource, rather than a nuisance never crossed any of their little minds.

Ugly face? Your comment was ugly. Honestly, I have tried and failed to connect the dots you are obviously connecting about how politicians of any stripe have caused the ice storm in your area or caused the subsequent consequences. Funny, your words said that when times get tough that landowners take from the land...landowners are seeking to take short term profits...land-owners, individuals; not jack-booted thugs from Washington are holding guns to their heads making them sell or burn their timber. You obviously are constantly upset by government...made up of people...Humans, like you, not made up of imaginary demons or space aliens.

So, why don't you run for county commissioner or some other post and attempt to positively influence your neck of the woods? Perhaps you could provide some leadership to influence environmental stewardship...town hall meetings at the Grange...motivate people to serve in county extension offices and such.

By the way, you obviously bow to Drudge and the rest of the uber-conservative media...and you also in many of your previous posts have pined for Rachel Carson...the crowd that Drudge runs with (The Limbaughs, the Levins, the Savages, and on and on)has made a cottage industry of demonizing and attempting to debunk Rachel Carson as some kind of communist femi-eco-nazi who motivates eco-freaks to destroy American greatness based on loosely-regulated extractive industries and rampant pollution.

Those woodlands suffered from occasional ice storms from time beyond imagining - long before the first humans ever set foot in the area.

What happened was that the downed wood just stayed where it fell. Various things went to work on it, ending up with the fungi and bacteria. Soil was built up underneath, to support new trees growing up into the holes opened up in the canopy - until the next ice storm hit, repeating the whole process yet again.

A forest of splintered trees, recently broken by ice storms, is every bit as much how that forest is "supposed" to look as is one that hasn't been hit by an ice storm for a while. They are both part of its natural state. The only thing unnatural is hauling away the deadfall so that it can't nurture the soil.

Nature's way. We ought to learn to live with it. We keep thinking we know better, but all we end up doing is demonstrating how little we actually do know.

This is an article about Owen's book on the Super-Greenness of New York City

Except that Owen himself moved out of NYC to a small city in Connecticut and praises his new home town's classic low-rise urban density.

NYC is not "more sustainable" than other places, particularly other places like Owen's new stomping ground. The default low energy mode for soaring glass towers is as salvage.

For a really nice version of urban design, consider downtown buildings from the mid-19th century, before elevators and air conditioning. They are typically five, six or seven stories. They usually have street level retail with office or residential spaces above. The seventh story was generally intended as the servants' quarters. Those are the garret windows peeking out of the roof line. Later they turned into cheap apartments.

The windows in a mid-rise building open. They are generally built as narrow slabs rather than as a massed block, to get light and air inside. More than one building that looks huge from the street turns out to be shaped like a U or O, with a rather nice courtyard interior.

There's a fair amount of mid-rise 19th century building stock still in use here and there, particularly in Chicago and New York. They were usually faced with stone and ornamented with architectural doo-dads, so they are good candidates for preservation.

In contrast, New York City's late 20th century high rise buildings are a lost cause without a high energy inputs. Nothing has a default manual or passive mode. Nobody claimed that hauling coal for the grate up to the seventh floor in an old mid-rise was fun, but compare than with electronic forced air and windows that don't open in a 30 story glass box.

Paris is full of the mid-rise buildings you describe with central courtyards allowing natural light and ventilation. Almost none of them have cooling and heating requirements are minimized due to the many shared walls for each apartment.
Unfortunately, US building codes and zoning prohibit Parisian-style construction almost everywhere (height restrictions, minimum parking requirements (the killer), setbacks, density limits, etc.).

Twenty seven years ago, I bought my first and, until yesterday, only toaster oven. It's a Philips model that's still in good working order, which I gather makes it a bit of a oddity among small household appliances (*). But like most toaster ovens of its day, it’s small, so you can’t do a whole lot with it and the results often turned out less than satisfactory – things either get overcooked/burnt or undercooked or, more often than not, a combination of the two. Consequently, it doesn’t get used all that much.

Our regular oven is rated at 5.5 kW and takes a good ten minutes to come up to its set temperature, so even before you slip in the pizza, you’ve burned through a full kWh of electricity and by the time its ready to come out, you’ve scarfed back one or two more. I hate using the damn thing for this reason, especially during the summer months.

Our new toaster oven is large enough to accommodate a 13 inch pizza and just about anything else you might want to throw at it, has far more precise temperature control, a convection fan and six independently modulated radiant heating elements (three on the top and another three on the bottom) that help ensure more even cooking, and electronic controls with various presets that pretty much eliminate any guesswork. It also automatically adjusts its cooking routines so if, for example, the oven is already up to temperature because you’ve just finished preparing something else, it will reduce its cooking time accordingly. It's virtually idiot proof and this idiot, for one, likes that.

Last night, I plugged it into a Kill-a-watt meter and cooked a pizza. Peak draw was 1.45 kW – a net saving of 4,000-watts – and total energy use from start to finish was just 0.28 kWh. I’m guessing our regular oven would have used six or seven times as much energy. Total cooking time, including preheating, was about fifteen minutes, which makes it a significant time saver as well. Short of a twenty-five pound turkey, I don’t expect we’ll be using our regular oven all that much going forward.

This toaster oven won’t cut our utility costs appreciably, but it will dramatically reduce our peak demand requirements during the most critical time of the day, i.e., the suppertime hour; in fact, our two ductless heat pumps, electric water heater and this toaster oven if they were to operate simultaneously draw less current than our conventional oven alone. It would seem my Christmas present to Nova Scotia Power has arrived a bit early.

(*) If, by some stroke of good fortune, the new one lasts half as long, by that point I'll either be dead or strapped to a wheel chair in some retirement home hallway, heavily medicated, leaning forward with drool running down my chin.

Our present GE range/oven (propane) always infuriates me because the stupid glow bar in the oven is ALWAYS on even though it is sucking down the propane.

What a piece of junk as well as a stupid design. It has suffered numerous failures and doesn't work very well anyway. As the flying spaghetti monster is my witness, I will never buy another GE appliance again.

Hopefully your new device is not a GE.

A new range IS on our list, but your solution might be a nice intermediate step. We try to cook on our woodstove for the cool part of the year.

We have a 36 inch Heartland Legacy dual fuel cooker, so the hobs are propane and the convection oven is electric; the oven is enormous which is why, in large part, it uses so much more electricity. We now have two BergHOFF induction hobs (both obtained by redeeming credit card points), so our propane usage as it pertains to cooking is pretty much nil. Induction hobs are 85 to 90 per cent efficient in terms of their heat transfer whereas a conventional electric or gas hob is generally about half that.

I have a Cuisinart toaster oven that I use a lot. I went without one for years, because I always considered toast a luxury. You can live without it. I finally bought a toaster oven for energy-efficiency reasons. I chose this particular model on the basis of reviews from Consumer Reports and at Amazon.com. I most often use it on the "convection bake" setting.

It's large enough to roast a chicken. I rarely use the regular oven any more. Maybe for Thanksgiving turkey, or when I bake cookies.

This one will toast up to six slices at a time and I have to say the results are quite good. If you have company and need to crank out a lot of toast in one shot, it's more than up to the task. However, for day to day use, I'll stick with my 70-year old flip-down toaster. The flip-down draws less than 600-watts -- the Breville, by comparison, draws three times this in toast mode -- and I can toast two slices using as little as 0.025 kWh. A conventional toaster would use three to four times this and a toaster oven would basically double that again.

I still don't eat toast very often. Just got out of the habit, I guess; we had toast almost every morning when I was growing up, and my parents still do. I lived like a college student for years after getting out of college, due to a combination of laziness and lack of money. ;-)

I read an article awhile back in the NY Times, about how people are using their rice cookers to make entire meals. That cracked me up, because I used to do that. My mom gave me a rice cooker when I was in college, and for years, it was the only appliance I had. I cooked all kinds of things in it.

What I like the toaster oven for is roasting vegetables. I love roasted vegetables - broccoli, asparagus, cauliflower, peppers, etc. The toaster oven is perfect for that.

I have a 30" Brown gas range. I think they are made in Canada. It does not use any
electricity at all. When I am finished using it, I turn off the gas on the supply
line. I am very satisfied with it. They have a website; and also I think Lehman's
sells them through their catalogue.

We bought the $200 DeLonghi precisely because I wanted to use it as an oven. That worked for a couple of years, but gradually the back bottom coil expanded (upwards) to where I could not fit taller items (there are two positions for the grille). At this point, 5 years into its life, it touches the grille and burns whatever is at the back.

So I can only toast 2-3 slices at a time, and if I bake cookies or roast anything, I have to make sure and leave the spot at the back empty or it will burn.

Our DeLonghi convection/rotisserie/toaster oven cost $70 at Macy's (with a rebate, which DeLonghi assures us by e-mail is in the works). We put off buying a new one because reviews on all appliances are uneven, but the sale price nudged us to act. The design flaws on the previous model shook our confidence in the brand, but none of the competition looked better.

Reviews aren't the whole story. We had an APEX DVD player because of its multi-region feature; some reviews were terrible and it had its glitches (fast-forward would freeze after a few seconds) but it did the job. Finally up-graded to a Phillips multi-region machine, which is better -- but the fast-forward button on the remote sticks (I put a bit of graphite on it from time to time.) On a local Website, the first three reviews of our favorite neighborhood Italian place are terrible -- placed by competitors or just by sore-heads?

You do have to be careful if there are only a few reviews. At least at online sites like Amazon. Chances are, the employees of the company, friends of the author, etc., are posting in support, and rivals are posting negative reviews. Not to mention the danger that always lurks in small sample sizes.

But if there are a lot of reviews, the truth will out. There were about 100 reviews for each of the toaster ovens I considered, so I felt that reviews were accurate. And the difference was quite stark.

There's also Consumer Reports. They give free trials, I believe. But being a magazine at its roots, they tend to lag behind online reviews. Often, the products they test are no longer available, and there are no tests for the newer models you might be interested in. Still, if it was a really pricey item, I would at least look at Consumer Reports first.

I just replaced my propane range, and bought a Premier. Instead of a glow bar, it uses spark ignition for the oven, which lights a pilot that stays on as long as the oven is turned on. When you turn the oven off, the pilot goes off. The thing is, if you have the oven on, then you want heat in there anyway, so the pilot is not wasted energy. The thing I really like about this system is that it thus becomes possible to light the oven, as well as the top burners, even if the power is out, using a match. Premier is the only gas range I know of that is built that way.

You might need to do some research to find them, not every place carries Premiers. I ordered mine from Best Buy online, I don't know if they even keep a floor model in the store. A well-designed and durable product, simple-technology, good value, made in usa - not the type of product our stores like to carry these days.

HH,
There are many things you can do with a toaster oven. Especially if like me you are the sole occupant of your living quarters.

They are extremely handy for certain items. Like heating up left over food,something you have as a leftover. Very good for french fries. English muffins. Will do toast(white bread) quite well.
I sometimes put just two slices of already cooked leftover pizza in mine. Thrown on some olive oil and more garlic. I eat a ton of garlic which I raise a lot of.

I sometimes brush brushetta on a slice of homemade bread, douse it with olive oil, some garlic or cheese and toast it. Bagels it does very well also.

It will not replace a real oven. I have a real oven but rarely use it. Right now I am using my microwave in Convection Mode to bake some Rustic Italian bread which I prefer over most others. Big enough for all my loaves to bake.

It just needs some imagination. I also have a device that has two heating pads. Known as a Grill. Sort of like what George Foreman sells. A Hamilton Beach...I can put chicken breasts on it, throw on some french fries or onions and grill them quite respectably.

I hate to heat up a big oven yet I do a huge amount of baking. I have several CrockPots as well. Right now one has 9 bean soup in it. Sits on top of my wood heater when the fire is out. I can eat this for 3 days.

I have just one hot plate(elec) for all the rest of my frying needs. Bacon and eggs and crepes,etc.

My elec bill reflects my frugality.

I also use my wood stove to cook a lot. Always keep a kettle on it for tea or hot choclate. No electricity used there.

I am now ordering a new hotplate that has a ceramic top. Will boil water in my cast iron kettle in about 2 or 3 minutes.

I have not used a real stove or oven in years. I do have a big charcoal smoker and a large LP gas fish cooker with two huge surfaces that I can with or cook fish when I have it. Keep a big cast iron pot with peanut oil always ready to go.

The days of Betty Crocker kitchens need to disappear. Lots of wasted energy. I prefer in the winter to just cook on top of my wood heater. My IR thermometer shows it gets hot enough to do just about anything. Just about like my grandmother, who I learned the old ways of cooking from as a youngster on the farm. No electric back then.

I confess I was sort of sheepish about replacing my old toaster oven, but the extra cooking capacity, precise temperature control, even heat distribution and intelligence of this new oven really set it apart from its predecessor. Basically, the things I couldn't do because the original oven was too small -- or couldn't do well because it was impossible to properly regulate temperature and/or because the centre directly below the one quartz tube would turn cook too quickly whilst the outer edges remain undercooked -- have been addressed with this new oven. The difference in their performance in night and day.

Arg - I really want a toaster over precisely for the energy savings, but our small kitchen does not have the counter space. I keep trying to figure out where to put one, but none of my suggestions have been approved by the boss of the kitchen.

Finding room for a bulky kitchen appliance in a small kitchen is akin to a 50-year old trucker trying to squeeze himself into a pair of spandex... might be possible, but it ain't likely to be pretty.

One nice thing about the old toaster oven is that you could tuck it inside a cupboard when you were finished using it, which is what we did. Not possible with the new guy, as it's about the size of a small microwave.

We used a DeLonghi toaster oven for ten years. One day it stopped working, so we got another DeLonghi. Unfortunately, it was new and improved -- no way to turn off the top elements when baking. This meant we had to keep an eye on things taller than toast, and slip a sheet of foil over them to keep the tops from burning. Still, it worked for ten years. We replaced it for two reasons: the bottom coils were sagging and touching the crumb tray, and we wanted a taller baking area. I occasionally made banana bread when the last of a bunch got over-ripe, and the loaf would rise up between the top heating coils. To get the pan out without burning the loaf on the front coil, I had to tip the pan over and bring it out bottom first. Now we have a new DeLonghi rotisserie model; we don't use the rotisserie but a loaf baking pan fits nicely into the space. And it has a real bake setting (no heat from the top) and a bake-with-fan setting which is supposed to be faster but may not be. We have toast most mornings, and the odd baked egg Florentine (a poached egg in a spinach nest covered with Parmesan cheese). Wish we'd known about the Breville -- the three elements sound as if they'd make for more even heating than DeLonghi's two.

The oven in our gas range is used only for storage of pots and pans. Since we can't figure out how to turn off the pilot light, our pans are always nice and warm.

Some time ago, there were stories that the banana was going extinct. All bananas are grown from cuttings of the original plant and are essentially clones. So a disease that hits one banana will eventually hit them all. But we still have bananas. Was that story wrong?

Nope. That strain of banana died out as predicted, and an inferior strain had to be cultivated and spread. That is the banana we now find in stores -- not so durable and tasty as the old one, but the only banana there is. Of course, it too is threatened in its turn.

Reminds me of the people who point to warnings that computers would all crash on Y2K as an example of dire predictions that didn't pan out. Actually, the danger was real and was averted only by much expensive reprogramming. Shows what can happen when a peril is foreseen and acted on. Afraid, however, that current problems are more like the banana, except there's no effective back-up.

The old variety was Gros Michel, the new variety is Cavendish. I am just old enough to remember the old Gros Michels when I was a kid. They were different from the Cavendish. They tended to not get quite as long, they were quite a bit more flavorful, and their peels were more slippery. Thus all the old slapstick gags about people slipping on banana peels in films up through about the 1950s or so. Then you started seeing that gag fade away. Today you almost never see it. People are eventually not even going to get the gag any more.

Since I lived in a small, inland town when I was a kid, I never, ever saw a green banana. They were always yellow with a few black spots. That was about as fresh as they ever could be by the time they got to us.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled "National Security Decision Making."

I wathed the clip, loved it and agree with almost everything he said. What I didn't find in the clip however was any kind of conspiracy theory. No one "conspired" to derfaud, defame, swindle or to overthrow any government. When the definition of "conspiracy theory" gets so broad as to include all history then it loses all meaning whatsoever.

Thanks Soup
That's as clear an outline of where 'we' are and how we got here as I've heard from a public figure in awhile.
We want 'Blueprint' but we are bound to get 'Scramble' every time. (I snuck ahead to parts 2 and 3) This time the 'lender/overlords' will probably just call the match however.
Well worth the time. thanks again

The December issue of Discover has an article called "Power Brokers: 8 Paths To Our Energy Future."

SOME CRISES HIT UNEXPECTEDLY - for instance, hurricane Katrina or the Indian Ocean tsunami. The energy crisis is something very different: a slow-motion problem unfolding in fits and starts right before our eyes, often in foreseeable ways. We know that the population of the world (and of the United States) will grow, and that people will expect an ever-increasing standard of living. We know that fossil fuel resources are finite. We also know that our current methods of energy generation have significant environmental drawbacks. in short, we have the luxury of preparing for the future now.

With that in mind, DISCOVER teamed up with the National Science Foundation to set up a series of briefings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Eight leading thinkers offered visioins of how to make our energy supply cleaner, more efficient, and more abundant. Here we feature highlights from their presentations. None of these proposals require magical breakthroughs. All they require is action.

8. JAMES D. McCALLEY, electrical and computer engineer, Iowa State Univeristy: Advanced computer models could be used to plan the mix of technologies, the means of distribution, and the environmental impact of our energy supply 40 years out.

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